Many programs have strong direct and indirect measures of student achievement for majors, including capstone courses, comprehensive exams, research papers, performances, etc. General education assessment is well established for the core competency areas, and the campus has approved measures to ensure that assessment is similarly rigorous for distribution areas. Significant advances have been made on the campus to document assessment practices and formalize the use of the data in decision making. Departmental student learning outcome assessment documents are posted on the web pages of the schools and colleges and linked to the Office of Assessment and Institutional Research’s website.

Departments continue to work to improve their assessment processes and formalize the use of this data in making curricular decisions. Our external consultant, Barbara Walvoord, has commented that “departments are finding ways to rely on both “indirect” data, i.e., student perceptions of their learning as revealed in surveys, and “direct” data, i.e., students’ performance on tests, exams, assignments, theses, exhibits, etc., to analyze student strengths and weaknesses as a group, and bring that information to the department, along with the survey data and the post-graduation data, so the department makes its decisions based on more than just student perceptions of their learning.”

All undergraduate degree students at UWM are required to fulfill general education requirements (GER). The Academic Program Planning and Curriculum Committee is the governing body for the approval and continuation of any course carrying GER credit. A subcommittee of the APCC evaluates the syllabus and course request form and recommends to the full committee formal designation of courses that satisfy the requirements.

The GERs are guided by Faculty Document 1382, approved by the UWM Faculty Senate and campus administration in November of 1984. The GERs have been reviewed and revised several times over the past 20 years.

Historically, the competency areas of the General Education Requirements have been the focus of much attention and assessment of student learning in math, foreign languages, and English composition is quite developed: The composition faculty makes extensive use of portfolios and reflective essays for assessing student learning; the mathematics faculty carefully tracks student placement, achievement, and progression in the math sequence; and the foreign language faculty uses proficiency guidelines established by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Today assessment activities are used to make decisions about placement, class size, teaching practices, tutoring, and course content. Indirect assessment of General Education also results from UW System surveys, the Graduating Senior Survey, and alumni surveys. Answers to the educational and personal growth section of the NSSE and FSSE surveys have been used to gain insights into student perceptions of learning.

In contrast to the competency areas, assessment of courses meeting the distribution requirements has been less rigorous. As first envisioned by the APBC, UWM’s General Education Requirements would ensure that all students enrolled in a restricted set of core courses that provided a basis of liberal arts and sciences (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and arts) as well as proficiency in composition, mathematics, and a foreign language. However, even before being adopted, the GERs, by deliberate faculty action, became broader and more diffuse than a few selected courses. And, after being in place, greater and greater flexibility needed to be offered to students in order to accommodate not only the various degree programs offered at UWM, but also the many students entering UWM as transfer and adult returning students. As a result, what began, at least conceptually, as a defined program with limited outcome goals became, as implemented and evolved, a diverse set of student experiences.